One of the first things to understand and appreciate about what we know as slavery is that it is an institution which goes back to antiquity. What we know or think of as slavery was old when the world was young. Slavery has come in many forms. The make up of a given society, the time and context in which this institution exists, its laws, its codes, its values, customs, and habits will give slavery many faces. Thus there have been many forms of subjugation of what we loosely call slavery.
What evolved as the institution of slavery (subjugation) in the United States is peculiar to its national heritage. In the U.S. enslavement of people, through its own set of complex laws, values, beliefs, and myths, and even “race” and color became the determining factor for enslavement for life. Enslavement in America meant that enslavement was hereditary, a cradle to grave reality. In short, enslavement was fixed in law and without fundamental human rights: No right to family and the sacrament of marriage and no right to a trial in a court of law. These two examples are but a few of the myriad of the restrictions from life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “The peculiar institution,” as American slavery was called, was quite different from enslavement in ancient societies, wherein the enslaved never lost rights to human personality, never lost rights to family hood. Only the labor, not the personhood, of the enslaved was “owned”.
The 12-, 14-, or 16-hour work day of the field hand was tied to a gang labor system, the forerunner to the assembly lines. As articles of merchandise and units of labor, the field laborer in the American system was devised to get the maximum degree of production. The servant class, or house slave, replaced the thralldom of serfdom in Europe. The skilled artisan resembled vassals on the Lord of the land, the task slave in America resembled itinerant laborers, or bondsmen of European serfdom of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The labor of the American enslaved was exploited to the fullest. The enslaved furnished the basic and vital energy and skill that produced American wealth from a) tobacco, b) sugar, c) rice, d) indigo and e) “king cotton”. The production of these cash crops accounted for more than half of the National wealth, in addition to creating wealth for investors and banks of Western Europe and rising capitalist families of the Northeast United States. There is a direct connection between the rise of the textile industry and cotton growing. Frederick Douglas referred to this powerful economic reality as the shameless tie between “the Lash and the loom”. At one point in this capitalist enterprise a new millionaire class emerged in both Natchez, MS and New Port, RI.
In addition to wealth production and super labor exploitation, another two classes of the enslaved stand out: the athlete and the entertainer, strictly speaking, the Black athlete on the slave plantation was America’s first visible professional sports figure. Enslaved boxers and jockeys earned significant purses, not for themselves, but for slaveholders who claimed their earnings from competition in addition to winnings from betting. The first Black athletes to gain fame from sports, were prize fighters and jockeys. Horse racing was America’s first national sport. The winner of the first running of the Kentucky Derby, the Aristides, was ridden by an ex-enslaved person named Olvier Lewis. Seventeen of the 23 riders in this race were Black. Horse riding was a highly developed aspect of Black culture before the Civil War.
The same can be said of the violent sport of boxing and Black American entertainers. Black singers, dancers and comedians invented the American Theater form called The Black-faced Minstrels. This was what White entertainers imitated, “copied” or “appropriated” from Daddy Rice and the New Christ Minstrels, Stephen Foster, to Al Jolson, star of the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer (1927). The famous statesmen and White supremacist, Thomas Jefferson, matter of factly commented on the genius of enslaved musicians and entertainers.
The overall meaning of the enslavement of Black people has meant that they were the engines that drove America’s first source of great social wealth; every American economic institution from the structure of field work, mining and manufacturing, to investment banking, insurance companies, and retail sales of food and assorted merchandise. The Atlantic slave trade was once the world’s biggest business. In Liverpool, England, shackles, whips, ball and chains, anklets and neck shackles, and with ship building made Liverpool (the town that gave us the Beatles) a center of commerce. Industry in Liverpool made (more than a thousand ships used to transport Africans from West Africa to the Americas and the islands of the sea.
The value of the enslaved labor to the American wealth cannot be overstated. Before the United States Treasury was developed, individual states used their own money instead of the pesos of Spain and Russian money. It was common place to see paper money from Virginia, Georgia or South Carolina with an image of a slave master on one side of the bill and the image of an African, rake or hoe in hand, on the other side. No better image could represent the value of slave power.
